We made a lot of walks around Las Palmas and last Wednesday we decided to visit Columbus museum in old part of the town. It is quite a walk, it is almost 4 km away from marina. The town of Las Palmas is not particularly pretty, too many big buildings without charm. Luckily every now and there there's a park, a water feature...
...interesting building...
...old pavilion...
...or gazebo.
I had to make a photo of this cow, we saw one just like this one in front of the shop in Ponta Delgada, Azores on our way back over the Atlantic. That time it was
Captain and Tadej that were posing with the cow.
After almost an hour we reached the old town. We visited the cathedral...
...but only one of it's towers.
There were nice views over the town...
...to the main square...
...and over the rooftops of old town with more churches. What caught my eyes was of course bright pink Bougainville bush.
We walked around for a while and saw again many nice balconies.
This is back side of the cathedral.
And this is old governor house that is now a library and Columbus museum. The house itself is stunning.
In the museum there's replica of Columbus' cabin on his ship Pinta. He was the only person on the ship that's got a cabin, everybody else just slept on the deck. And probably preyed for good weather, I guess.
And this is old manual auto-pilot - you just tie the tiller so that the boat is going exactly in the direction you want.
There were so many interesting things - details of the routes, Columbus' letters, old charts, of which some just had ocean West of Europe and then there was India.
But just as interesting was the house itself, we were particularly impressed by the carved wooden ceilings.
Old dresser
Inner court with parrots
Door to the next part of building
In the crypt there were some tombs...
...but also many artefacts from pre-Columbian middle America.
And then there were more wooden ceilings - just imagine the work that went into that!
This is an astrolabe from around 1500. It is a predecessor of a sextant and was used for calculating position in respect to sun and the stars (among other things). Old Greeks were already using them 200 years bc.
It was all pretty amazing, otherwise we wouldn't have stayed in there for three whole hours. After that we walked around the old town some more...
...and checked some restaurants - we were quite hungry and tired by now.
We consulted internet and found a restaurant where there were only locals eating, and we had another ropa vieja for late lunch. It was different than the one in Teror, this one had some pieces of sausages and bacon as well and it had more wintery flavour. But it was just as good as the first one we had.
Sun was already setting when we returned to marina.
I love the soft evening light, even the palms along the highway looked romantic.
We were quite tired when we returned to the boat. Plan for next day was to visit the aquarium, I just hoped my legs would have enough rest till then.
No comments:
Post a Comment